"The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, "I was wrong." - Sydney J. Harris

3/26/2010

Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald

There are many love stories that end happily ever after. This is a love story that does not, but because it does not end happily, the reader can better appreciate the love story.

Dick Diver is a well respected and beloved psychiatrist. He falls in love with a mental patient and over the next ten years bankrupts himself mentally and emotionally to keep her cured. She eventually is cured and he is broken.

The strangest part of this book is that it appears that Fitzgerald was writing one story, and when he was about 60-80 pages into it, found a better story to tell. Instead of going back and changing the beginning he left it, seemingly letting the reader get to the point of the real story the same way that he did. It allowed him to tell an incredibly poignant story without getting bogged down in the back story in the beginning.

I don't know that everyone will enjoy the book. But if you like the writing style and story telling of The Great Gatsby, you will like this. In my opinion it is a better story, told better, and filled with more emotion.